As most people who follow this blog know, I write science fiction and fantasy. In the Science Fiction arena I tend to write Military Scifi or Space Opera. I try my hardest to get the tech right, and that includes the limitations of any such tech. Sure, I make some stuff up. I would be very surprised if the eight layers of hyperspace and one of subspace from the Exodus series ever becomes fact. But with the weapons and other tech I try to stay true to fact. When possible I stay within the realms of the possible. To those who say what I write is not possible, I say, five hundred years ago people said the only way to travel on the seas was with wind or muscle power, and they would have called nuclear powered warships pure flights of fantasy. I have several books out that explore future military action, including The Deep Dark Well series and the Exodus: Empires at War series, as well as the stand alone novels The Shadows of the Multiverse and We Are Death, Come For You. Closer to our time period are The Scorpion and Afterlife. But I really like to write the far future novels, five hundred to forty thousand years in the future.
Starship Troopers, Heinlein’s masterpiece of future warfare, was probably the first military scifi novel I ever read. With its far future look at combat, especially ground combat, using the high tech powered armor that has been copied so much since (including by this writer). Heinlein really didn’t delve too far into the field of infantry weapons, though. Some projectile weapons were mentioned, as well nuclear tipped rockets and many types grenades. Perfect weapons for use against unarmored targets or ground installations. Probably not so good for use against opponents armored as they were. I will touch upon what I think will be the weapons that these kind of soldiers will use in the future. Many of these ideas come from other books, some are my original ideas as far as I know. Since I haven’t read everything there may be instances of those ideas already out there, but if I don’t know about them I still consider them original ideas. In this series of blogs I will be discussing infantry weapons, the kind of instruments used to fight on the surface of a planet or in actions to take and defend spaceships and stations. In most cases this will involve close in fighting, no more than ten kilometers apart, and most often much closer. This is not to say that an infantry soldier in powered armor can’t take to the skies and hit something fifty kilometers away. But that will be rare, and would expose the soldier to a counterattack by powerful weaponry as well. Weapons that obliterate everything within kilometers, including people in armored suits, will not be suitable as an infantry weapon. They could be used as orbital bombardment weapons, but not in a man on man fight.
Part one of this blog will concern itself with projectile weapons, part two with light amp and explosive devices, and part three with other energy type weapons. Part four will talk about what people might wrap themselves in to ensure some survivability in the environment of these kind of weapons. So let’s start off with projectile weapons, familiar today in the form of rifles, pistols and machine guns. Now, I will be the first to admit that these weapons may survive, even in their chemically powered forms, in the arenas of hunting and personal protection, though I really think other options will become available in protection and law enforcement. When I see a movie that is not post apocalyptic and is set a century or more in the future and uses current projectile weapon technology I cringe, and wonder why the writer couldn’t come up with something better. As personal protection, in the form of powered armor, improves, then projectile weapons must improve as well. The best Barrett fifty cal sniper rifle would bounce off good armor as it is forged in the future. A machine gun would simply make noise pinging its useless rounds off the armor. To get through that kind of protection we will either need a more efficient penetrator, or a greater velocity. Putting shape charges in the projectile, especially with some kind of superhard penetrator, might do the job, but I think against really good armor this would also not be the answer. But increasing the velocity of the round would increase the power to the square of the velocity. In other words, doubling the velocity quadruples the kinetic energy, the hitting power of the bullet. Chemically powered bullets probably have a limit, unless we can come up with some really powerful propellants. The answer would seem to be in the realm of magnetic propulsion, the mag rifle or railgun. Weapons could be set to send a projectile at a desired velocity. Slower for soft targets, faster for heavy armor. I doubt a weapon sending its projectile at its maximum velocity would be fast firing. It would probably be a tradeoff between velocity and rate of fire, unless it was a crew served mounted weapon. There is also the physics problem of equal and opposite reaction. If you fire a super high velocity round, like Arnold did in Eraser, the recoil is going to fling you through the air in an equal reaction the other way. Powered armor may help, the actual propulsion units of the armor compensating for the recoil. In Exodus I use grabber units (the standard propulsion units on Imperial ships and vehicles) on some of the heavy rifles to pull the barrel in the opposite direction of the recoil.
In John Ringo’s Posleen series, the humans and Posleen invaders use hypervelocity weapons that fire small pellets at an appreciable fraction of light speed. At rapid fire these things are deadly, capable of killing thousands of soft targets in a second. The fast moving rounds transfer their kinetic energy into the target with explosive results, and are capable of going through a line of targets before losing their velocity. They are essentially mag rifles of highly advanced design. But there are also self propelled projectiles in some works, like the hyper-v rockets in Ringo’s novels, a rocket using advance tech instead of propellants to get up to ultra high velocity. These things would be suit killers, as well as tank and aircraft destroyers. In the third Exodus book I introduce a sniper rifle that flings a self powered projectile that accelerates all the way to the target. There were examples of rocket rounds in the past, and may be again in the future. Smart rounds are another possibility, projectiles with propulsion, a sensor and a brain that allows them to track a target, even going around corners to track on an enemy. I think that projectile weapons will still have a place in the future, but I think that for most uses one of the more advanced weapons will come to fore. The limitations of projectile weapons are of course the need to carry ammo and a power source, the same limitations as some of the energy weapons I will discuss in the third part, or even light amp weapons, which still need a power supply. And a weapon that has terrific penetrating power would not be the first choice for defending a spacecraft, where hull penetration might be a problem.
Explosive projectile weapons, like rifle grenades, will be discussed in the next part.